IV
You already know, from our former discussion, how our reason views the situation thus created by this chaos of social and of individual interests. How real and how confused this chaos is, the daily record of certain aspects of the ordinary social life of men which you see in each morning's newspaper [{187}] may serve to illustrate. These princes and peoples, these rebels and executioners, these strikers and employers, these lovers and murderers, these traders and bankrupts, these who seem for the moment to triumph and these who just now appear to be ground under the opponent's or the oppressor's heel, what arts of living were they and are they all following? Well, each in his way appears to have been choosing to have his own will; yet each, being a social creature, had learned from his fellows all his vain little arts of life. Each loved some of his fellows and was the rival of others. Each had his standards of living, standards due to some more or less accidental and unstable union of all the motives thus barely suggested. The news of the day tells you how some of these won their aims, for the moment, while others were thwarted. What I ask you to note, and what the reason of every man in his more enlightened moments shows him, is that each of these who at any moment was thwarted, precisely in so far as he had any will of his own at all, was defeated not only by his fellows, but by himself. For this special will of his was some caprice not large enough to meet his own ends. The career, for instance, of that man who failed in love or in business or in politics is wrecked. His reputation is lost. Well, it was his will, as a social being, to aim at just such a career and to value just that sort of reputation. Had he chosen to be a hermit, or a saint, or a Stoic, what would just such [{188}] a career and such a reputation have been to him? How could he have lost unless he had sought? And his failure, to what was it due? No doubt to some choice of his own quite as much as to his rival's skill. He wanted freedom to carry on his own speculations. He got that freedom and lost his fortune. He wanted to be free to choose whom and how to love. He had his way and defeated his own aim. He chose to follow his ambitions. They have led him where he is.
Such are perfectly reasonable reflections upon the course of ordinary social conflicts. They suggest to our more considerate moments the very sort of reflection which, at the outset of the present discussion, led us to define the religious ideal of salvation. Only now this type of reflection appears as aiming to lead us to some practical rule for guiding our active life. For our attention is now fixed, not on a condition to be called salvation, but on a rule for doing something in accordance with our own true will. This rule is, negatively stated, the following: Do not seek, either in your individual self as you are or in your social experience as it comes, for the whole truth either about what your own will is or about how you can get your aims. For if you confine yourself to such sources of moral insight, you will go on thwarting yourself quite as genuinely, even if by good luck, not quite as scandalously, as the bankrupt speculators and the strikers and the outcast oppressors, and the politicians [{189}] and the murderers, and the deposed monarchs and the defeated revolutionists, of whom you read in the newspapers, have thwarted both their individual and their social will. In brief: Put not your trust in caprices, either individual or social. On the positive side, the rule here in question is: In order to find out what is your true choice, and how you can live without thwarting yourself, make your principle of life such that whatever fortune besets you, you can inwardly say: "I have not really failed, for I have acted as I intended, and also as I still intend to act, and have had my will whatever the consequences that fortune has brought to me, or however my momentary mood happens to change, or however this or that social caprice leads men to love or to despise me." Such is the moral insight that the first use of your reason, in thus reviewing life, suggests. Or, as the moral common-sense of the wise has often stated the rule here in question: So act that, upon any calm review of the sense of your individual and of your social life, you shall never have ground to regret the principle of your action, never have ground to say: "By choosing thus I thwarted my own will."
As you hear these statements, I hope that, reduced to their very lowest terms: "So act as never to have reason to regret the principle of your action," they express a sort of counsel for life which is not strange to common-sense, even if it has received an abstract expression in the famous ethical philosophy of Kant. [{190}] Only, as you will rightly insist, this counsel is indeed a seemingly hopeless counsel of perfection when it is addressed to the natural man, who merely has taken his instincts as he found them developing, and his social world as he has felt it fascinating or disturbing him, and who has then stumbled on, more or less prudently and obstinately trying to find out what it really is that he wants to do in life. Such a man will cry out: "But how shall I discover a principle of life such that, if I hold thereto, I shall never, upon any reasonable survey of life, regret following that principle?"